


the waves come after midnight

by sleep_is_good_books_are_better



Series: Sig's Bad Things Happen Bingo (aka Torture Tekēhu Week) [1]
Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Anger born of worry, Bad Things Happen Bingo, F/M, Family, Jumping to Conclusions, Miscommunication, Protective Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-11-05 08:55:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17915750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleep_is_good_books_are_better/pseuds/sleep_is_good_books_are_better
Summary: Svana hasn't seen her sister, Yndira, in nearly twenty years. Since leaving the Lands, her sister has picked up some new titles (Watcher of Caed Nua and the Herald of Berath among them), a new set of friends (some of which Svana's heard of, most of whom she hasn't), and a new lover besides.As far as the latter is concerned, Svana does not approve.At all.





	the waves come after midnight

The door to Yndira’s chambers settles into its frame with a low click. Before taking a step further, Svana leans back, so her head hits the wood with a thunk. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. It’s done. Her task is done. Her sister knows. Now they just need to hold funeral rites, and then Svana could go home, if she wished.

She doesn’t.

Yndira is on a mission from the gods, and Svana doesn’t trust a single person in this ship of vipers to see her sister safely to its conclusion. Keyush pushes his snout into her side. He can feel her anxiety, she knows, just as she can feel the tension in his legs, as if he is making ready to pounce. He likes it here in this overly warm, insect-infested archipelago about as much as she does. She threads her fingers through his pelt.

“I’m sorry, Keyush, but it looks like it’ll be a bit longer until we go home,” she murmurs to him in Ordhjáma.

At the sound of her whispers, one of the elves in the hold, the Glamfellen one with the dead eyes, looks up, and Svana curses herself for lingering. There is a reason Yndira chose to shut herself away in her cabin as opposed to sharing her grief with her crew, and Svana should not display her weakness so openly. She nods to the Glamfellen as she passes by on her way above deck, but she takes pains to keep her expression a neutral mask.

She heads to the stern to find a dwarf with a rather substantial beard at the helm.

“Beodul, is it?”

He turns slightly to her and offers her a smile. “Aye, that be me. Any news from the captain?”

Svana forces her lips to turn up at the edges, though the helmsman’s grin leaves her slightly uncomfortable. “Yes, she told me she wished to drop anchor at the island north of Karatapu Channel?” She can hear her voice get slightly higher at the end of the sentence. She had only caught a glimpse of the name on one of her sister’s maps. She has no idea if she’s pronouncing it even close enough to correctly for the helmsman to know what she’s talking about.

Beodul glances up at the sky for a moment before nodding. “Aye, I can do that. Anything else about why we’re stopping there?”

_To hold our father’s funeral, you cur, but that’s none of your business,_ Svana thinks but doesn’t say. She’s about to turn away when a thought slips into her mind. “There was one other thing. When we get there, she wants the crew to… empty out. Enjoy some time off the ship.”

Beodul squints at her, and Svana smooths out the edges of her smile.

“All right, lass, I’ll pass the orders off to the rest of ‘em.”

Svana inclines her head slightly, not enough to be called an bow. “Thank you.” Then she turns and leaves, heading down the ship towards the bow. Anything to find a single spot where she can have some peace and quiet.

The deck of the Defiant isn’t gargantuan by any stretch of the imagination, and the scattering of people across it makes finding true privacy impossible. At least the bow looks mercifully empty. Maybe, once they get to this island, Keyush can finally get a chance to swim the way he’s been itching to since they got to these accursed tropics. Perhaps _he’ll_ finally get a chance to cool down a bit. _At least one of us may yet be saved from death by heatstroke._ As far as Svana is concerned, the real thing the Deadfire is missing is a nice ice sheet. Maybe then her sister would feel a bit more at home.  

Svana is so consumed with her thoughts (well, they’re more of an internal tirade than anything else) that she barely notices the smell until it’s nearly so heavy in her nose as to be overpowering. Then it registers, and she stops, narrows her eyes, and takes a deeper breath, just to be sure.

“So that’s what it was,” she mutters to Keyush in Ordhjáma.

The scaled man standing next to the railing turns to her to regard her quizzically, and she curses her carelessness. Even after decades of trade with mainlanders, she still sometimes forgets how acute their hearing can be.

“What say?” the man asks.

Nothing about his expression is hostile, and yet. Svana allows her gaze to scan down the length of his body, noting his posture, his attire. From the bare chest to the hand on his hip to the curve of his spine, everything about this man says he’s _preening_ , as if he’s waiting for some unseen sculptor to immortalize him in marble. Something ugly grips Svana’s insides. She knows what’s happening here.

She returns his open expression with a closed one: eyes narrowed and mouth set firmly. “My sister’s cabin reeks of fish.”

He blinks once, twice, but doesn’t deny it. Or maybe he’s simply doesn’t realize what she’s implying. It doesn’t matter either way. When she doesn’t say anything else, he takes a step back. He bumps up against the side of the ship before straightening fully. Svana can see the corners of his mouth relaxing, but she doesn’t wait to hear what he has to say. Instead, she simply stalks away.

She walks until she runs out of ship, ending up with a hip propped against the ships’ figurehead as she racks her brain for what she remembers about… whatever the fuck that man was. His height tells her aumaua, while the scales and fins and were those tentacles on his head? say godlike. One of Vatna’s marked, then, like Fannar. _And l_ _ike Yndira,_  a small, unhelpful voice notes. Svana shakes it off. Her sister is nothing like that... like that performer. She angles her head back, just a bit, so she can watch him out of the corner of her eyes. Every few minutes, he conjures a fish made out of water, which swims above his palm for a few moments before he waves it out of existence with a toss of the head and flex of the wrist. Careless, then, she thinks, and, observing how he puffs his chest out, probably with an inflated sense of self-importance. Young, too, if one of the aumaua can ever truly be anything else by the standards of her people. She thinks of her sister, still locked in her cabin with only a piece of thin wood for protection. What will she do if this man comes to her again tonight, so full of his own needs and desires and worries that there is no room for Yndira’s own, and too young by half to recognize the gift her sister is giving him with her time and attention? Svana knows Yndira well enough to know what will become of her. She is well aware that if she does not act, this man could swallow her sister whole.

* * *

 

The deck of the Defiant is dim as Tekēhu makes his way across, and a tad slippery besides. With the entire crew making camp on the island, they thought it safer to extinguish all the lanterns on board, leaving him with the only the light of stars to guide him. The moon is nowhere to be seen; it seems that even his mother has hidden her face tonight. At Eliam’s orders, the rest of the crew had left the boat, eager to sleep on a surface that wasn’t rocking for once, but notably, their captain had remained where she had been tucked away all day – in her cabin below decks.

That, of course, in and of itself, would be a cause for him to worry – even on the days she spends bent over her desk, Yndira still makes time to visit him on the deck at least once – but he knows tonight is no ordinary break for the sake of the crew’s morale. As they were setting anchor and making to disembark, Tekēhu had spotted Edér tugging Svana to the side. For a moment, Tekēhu was concerned for Edér safety ( _Ekera,_ he had thought, _that woman is pricklier than a sea urchin_ ), but she had only tensed before Edér had bent to whisper in her ear. Something about “your sister,” and “doin’ all right.” Svana had scanned him from head to toe before answering, almost too softly for Tekēhu to hear, even only a few scant paces away.

“It’s our father – he recently passed.” 

And then the deck had fallen away beneath his feet. Even now, hours later, Tekēhu’s chest still feels knotted. _Ekera, no, not her,_ he had thought, is still thinking, if he’s perfectly honest. No one deserves to lose a parent, and Yndira has already lost so much – her home and her god and her home again. He remembers the fondness in her eyes as he had told her of his father, the way her lips had curved into a gentle smile.

_When I was little, before my horns came in, my father would call me selkóper – little seal  – because the nubs on my head reminded him of their ears._

He still remembers the fondness the memory carried, for while Yndira does not talk of her home often, it is not difficult to see how she misses it. When they first brought Ydwin on board, the two were nigh inseparable for days, Yndira was so thrilled to see one of her own people again, to say nothing of how she complains of the Deadfire’s warmth. There are times when he wonders how she does not resent the gods for thrusting her on this quest when she could be back with her people and her land.

Then he remembers her voice again, raw this time, cracked and falling apart at the edges from the weight of decades of loneliness.

_Ekera, Ngati made you as-_

_Ngati “made” me? She made me alone!_

Tekēhu closes his eyes against the darkness of the stairwell. _Not alone, I say_. Not this time. Not now, when she is surrounded by a crew that cares for her. She has built this crew out of misfits and loners and oddities, pieced together with compassion and held in place by a fierce and abiding devotion to the captain that gave many of them a chance when no one else would. When he told her of the his suspicions about the Watershaper’s Guild, she had not tossed them aside, as so many had. She had not written him off, like so many others had, as nothing more than a particularly colorful fish darting around Periki’s Overlook. She had listened, to that and so much more, and she had cared, then and so many other times besides, and now it is his turn to listen and care for her.

He has just made to the landing and is making ready to knock his fist against the door when a spear slides between him and the wood, and he starts, turning to follow the wooden pike to its bearer. Yndira’s sister peers up at him from the darkened corner next to the door. Her body seems relaxed, but the spear in her grip remains still as a stone as smile stretches across her face. Tekēhu is struck by the notion that the expression is not particularly friendly, but then something shifts about her cheeks, and he tells himself he must have imagined it. Her father has just died, after all. He can allow her some peculiarities.

“Tekēhu.”

“Svana.” He gestures to the door, to the spear still blocking his way. “I was hoping to have a word with your sister.”

Everything about Svana is still. The smile stays affixed to her face as surely as the spear remains affixed to the door. Only her pale gaze seems to sharpen. “Yndira asked for privacy.”

For a moment, Tekēhu hesitates as he turns over Svana’s words in his mind. In his experience, he has known Yndira to only rarely desire solitude, and even then, it is usually because she is working on something that requires peace and quiet. She spends most of her days on the deck, speaking with the crew, or praying, or reading, or sometimes even simply perched on the railing just off the bowsprit, her head angled into the wind and  her face tilted towards the sun.

Svana inclines her head slightly. “Why do we not go for a walk?”

Tekēhu forces a chuckle past the lump of uncertainty in his chest. “We are on a ship. It would have to be short walk, I say.”

Svana’s spear scrapes against the wood of the door as she slides it down to her side. She walks past him, and it isn’t until she has one foot on the steps leading to the deck that she turns back to face him. “My apologies. I assumed those fins were for more than show.” Her grin has grown teeth.

Tekēhu’s first instinct is to be affronted by the implication, but he crosses his arms against the urge. To leave his captain like this does not sit right with him, and he is loath to allow Svana’s barbed words goad him into accepting an unwelcome challenge. Yndira has only just learned of her father’s death. He thinks of his own mortal parents, who he has not seen in years, and imagines what he would do if he were to hear tell of their passing. He imagines learning of such a thing in a tiny cabin, with nothing but his thoughts to keep him company, and the knot in his chest grows tighter. But Svana simply stares at him, and he feels a trickle of doubt start to drip down his spine. What does he know? He only met Yndira a few scant months ago, and Svana has known her all her life. If she says Yndira wishes to be alone, perhaps she knows better than he.

He forces his arms to relax and follows her up to the deck. Her teeth gleam dully in the light of the stars as she leans over the railing to peer into the water below. Once she has pulled off her leathers, she calls out to her… pet, though Tekēhu is loath to use such a diminutive word to describe such a massive beast.

“Keyush, you know how this works. No holes, _já_?” The obedient cat opens his grandiose jaws and closes them around the bundle of leather in Svana’s hand, which she carefully maneuvers as to avoid getting it skewered on one of animal’s protruding canines. Ekera, they are even too big to fit in the cat’s maw. Yndira complains about the wildlife of the Deadfire, but Svana’s Keyush would make even Onekaza’s Kohopa and Tangaloa seem small. Once Keyush has a firm grip on the leather, Svana lets go, casting a grin Tekēhu’s way. “His name – it means pup. It was supposed to be a nickname but,” (Here she smiles down at Keyush in a manner that is equal parts fond and exasperated. Tekēhu remembers Mairu wearing a similar expression many times.) “but then he never grew up.”

Svana’s gaze rises up to meet Tekēhu’s again, and he once again forces himself to remember that she has just lost her father. Of course she is somewhat short-tempered and difficult to get along with. It will likely pass with time.

Svana raises an eyebrow at his state of dress, but he says nothing. She will figure it out soon enough. She just inclines her head at the water. “Shall we?”

Tekēhu nods. The graceful arc Svana’s dive traces into the water shouldn’t come as any surprise. It’s more utilitarian than some of Yndira’s spectacles, and less elaborate, but it speaks to the same decades of practice. He waits until he hears the splash, as well as Keyush’s accompanying one, before levering himself over the side. As he falls, he allows the change to rush over him, feeling his brow widen, his spine elongate, and gills slash themselves open along his side. When he lands in the water, he is Tekēhu no more. Instead, he is a shark, grey and sleek and powerful.

He pretends not to notice Svana’s widened gaze. He slows his swim speed deliberately to allow her to keep up, but she does so admirably, and he is left with the distinct inkling that he could have easily swam twice as fast and she would have had few troubles. Keyush paddles alongside them, only a few paces away, with his head purposefully thrust out of the water to keep Svana’s clothing dry. Once they reach the shallows, Tekēhu shifts back, Svana redresses with the same practiced efficiency she undressed with, and soon they are picking their way across the beach in the starlight.

The quiet between them isn’t quite awkward, but it isn’t comfortable either. Svana went to the effort to get Tekēhu out here, but now she seems content with silence. Finally, he decides starting this conversation will have to fall to him. “Ekera, I am sorry for your loss.”

Svana’s shoulders shake in a cross between a laugh and a sigh, and Tekēhu suddenly remembers that he is not supposed to know that. “Ships are no place for secrets, it would seem.” She waves him off with a dismissive hand. “It was months ago. My sister is not an easy women to find.” He can hear how her lips twist into a grimace. “Especially now that she has decided to live on a boat.” Her face relaxes, and she casts him a wry glance. “You can imagine how it felt to arrive at her keep and find it a ruin.”

Yes, that was likely… not pleasant.

“And now she has decided to sail an archipelago hundreds of miles away from anything resembling home, chasing after one god on the orders of another, and probably taking the time to solve the problem of every kith she meets on the way.”

At this, Tekēhu has to share in Svana’s laughter. “Ekera, that does sound like Yndira. From royalty to Roparu, I say she holds no one to be beneath her aid.”  _There is much to be learned from her example_ , he thinks, but does not say. “You must know her well.”

“ _Sjálvitað_. She has always been like this.” Svana turns her head look past him at the waves. This late at night, small patches glow faintly with bioluminescence. “Your people, they fish, do they not?”

“Ekera, naturally. The Huana have always relied on Ngati’s bounty to feed our people.”

“So perhaps this will make sense to you. When fishing, you cannot catch the whole school, or next season, there will be nothing for the clan, _já_? You must leave some fish in the ocean, so there will be more in the future.”

He nods. This is all true; From his days on Etūa, he remembers how important it was not to overfish the reef, or next year’s haul would be lean. But he does not understand what this has to do with Yndira, or what it has to do with him.

Svana stops, staring straight ahead down the beach. “My sister does not understand this. She would pull more and more of herself out of the deep, uncaring that there will one day be nothing left.” Now she looks down. “She thinks her compassion as endless as the sea. She gives and she gives and she gives, to the gods, to her people.” Her gaze come up again, not quite meeting Tekēhu’s own. In the darkness, her pale purple eyes appear as black as the night sky between the stars. “To her… companions.”

Something about this reminds Tekēhu of this morning, of how her glare was filled with a thousand veiled condemnations about him, and about his presence in Yndira’s life. He knows what the crew says of them. Up until now, he has had no problem with the talk, has taken it across the chest like a badge of honor. Half the people on the Defiant want to bed the ship’s captain, but it is only the handsome fish who has caught her eye and captured the curve of her smile. But Svana is not some crew member, is she? She is something completely different. She is family.

“Too often,” she continues, “Yndira gets nothing in return.”

Ekera, he is not the one who left alone in her cabin to mourn! He is about to say as much when Svana steps ahead of him. She tilts her head, only slightly, looking at him the way a child looks at a particularly interesting puzzle. “Tell me, what do you really think you can offer my sister?”

What?

She casts a dismissive wave at the water lapping at the sand. “A few parlor tricks?” One side of her lips ticks up. “Your wealth of life experience?” She says this as if the very idea is laughable. Then she flicks her gaze along his body to his feet, and despite her small stature, Tekēhu gets the distinct impression that she’s looking _down_ at him. “One of those mainlander diseases you’re no doubt incubating?”

_Excuse me?_ Tekēhu has never felt any shame over his numerous lovers. More importantly, Yndira has never made anything of his wealth of experiences, save for perhaps a fond roll of the eyes and an exasperated smile. “That’s-“

Svana takes a step towards him then, and he recoils at the venom in her eyes. “What do you have to give her that is not worn out, used up, or too young to matter? A gift is not a gift if it is given to everyone.”

The way she looks at him… it leaves him feeling distinctly unclean, like a soiled rag that has been left in the sun. “I-“

A open-mouthed laugh falls through Svana’s teeth, and Tekēhu thinks he has never heard such a cruel sound. “Exactly. My sister thinks of nothing but helping others, but you? You think of no one but yourself.”

Suddenly, Tekēhu is back in the Gullet, watching as an unwashed beggar latches on to Yndira’s leg. _I would have recoiled_ , he remembers thinking. _I would shoved her back, pulled away, anything to get out of her grasp._ He remembers how Yndira had dropped to her knees in the mud, uncaring of how she was soiling her armor and her hands and probably her hair besides, how she had given the women food and soft words and kindness. He remembers watching, not sure if it was the smell of garbage or his own weakness that so disgusted him. 

Biha’s words drift back to him.

_“Do the gods pay a visit to mock my misfortune, or is Sacred Stair overcrowded?”_

_“Ah… forgive the intrusion. I was- we were just leaving. That is, giving you space to grieve.”_

_“So many crowd into the Gullet, and you worry about space!”_

Her bitter laughter had landed on his chest like blows, and all he had wanted, in that moment, was to be back in Periki’s Overlook, back in the Watershaper’s Guild under Mairu’s irate gaze, where at least he did not have to feel such _guilt_. Yndira had spared him no more than a glance before shaking her head and turning back to Biha. She had not faltered at the woman’s righteous anger. Biha’s desperation had washed over them like a wave, but it broke on Yndira’s steadfast form like the tide against rocks. 

Ngati’s chosen is supposed to care for the Huana people, and Tekēhu has proven he cannot even do that. No, instead he has brought her to his archipelago, off-loaded all of his responsibilities on to her, and then let her solve his problems for him. He remembers his flighty comment to Prince Aruihi, after returning from Delver’s Row, about not getting his hands dirty, and how Yndira had cast him a glance out of the corner of eyes filled with something a lot like disappointment. For the first time in his life, it felt like he was being truly judged. He has no doubt he had been found lacking.

Ropes of self-doubt begin to knot their way through his chest, and he feels his fists clench as he pushes his own inadequacies aside. “And yet you would leave her to face her father’s death alone! I am not the one that would give her nothing, I say!”

Svana’s lip curls into something resembling disgust, and she rolls her eyes as if she has never heard of anything more ridiculous. “You speak as if you have never even _met_ my sister! I only left because if I were to stay with her, her only thought would be of comforting me. I do not leave her so that she must grieve alone, I leave her alone so that she may grieve at all!”

“If you think your sister truly wishes to be alone in her grief, then you-“

Where she had previously angled her body to face the sea, Svana now closes her posture, so that her chest is level with his own. Her lips curl into a snarl. “You dare speak of my sister as if you know her better than me? You stupid, selfish, mainlander _boy_.” She punctuates each of the words with an accusatory jab of her finger, thrust forward as if her fingernail is the tip of a spear. “Your greed would drain Yndira _dry_!”

Her nail gleams hard and flat in the starlight, and suddenly Tekēhu hears his whispered confession from months ago, a dark spot of doubt in the shining streets of Periki’s Overlook.

_“If Ngati had not touched me, I… I wonder if anyone would care.”_

For all her complaints of the Deadfire’s heat, Yndira’s hand had been warm as she laced her fingers through his and squeezed. Then she had brought their interlocked hands up so they hung before her eyes, uncurling her fingers and pressing her palm into his. The light that glanced off of his silver scales danced among the white marks on Yndira’s blue skin. She had tilted her head to look at the contrast between her odd coloration and his, so different and yet both signs of the same goddess’ favor. Then she swung her head back to look at him, her eyes as wide and bright and loving as the full moon. In the light of those eyes, he had thought, for the first time, that maybe he had it in him to reach his destiny.

Time and time again he has returned to her, bearing his hopes and his needs and his fears, if only so that he can bask in that warmth for a small while longer. But how often has he returned the favor? How often has he asked her to tell him of her troubles? Her burden, after all, is even greater than his own, for she must bear not only the hopes of an archipelago but of all kith, and the weight of the gods’ demands as well. It must get heavy, but for all the exhaustion he has seen lining her eyes, when has he ever offered to help her carry it? Even now, he has sought her out for his bed, and _why?_ Because he hopes that she can give _him_ what he desires. Besides being cowardly, he is selfish besides.

Svana’s own mocking laughter bears echoes of Biha’s. “Perhaps I am not being clear enough.” She steps forward again, and this time, she lunges forward, and up, so her nose is not a fist’s width away from his own. “My sister deserves better than _you._ ”

It is true. Ekera, it is _true._ Yndira has never cared for all the titles, for any of the trappings of “Ngati’s chosen,” but take that away and what is left? Only Tekēhu. And he is not enough.

That is why Svana’s words hurt so. Because he knows that she is right.

Dimly, he becomes aware of something trickling down his spine, and he realizes that his hair must be leaking. There is a film of tears in his eyes, blurring his vision, but he can just make out Svana stepping back with something like a satisfied grin on her face.

“I’m glad we could have these words.” Turning to gaze up the beach, she whistles for Keyush. As she walks away to meet him, she turns back to Tekēhu, her smile once more in place. “Have a good night.”

And then she departs, leaving him to fall apart among the starlight and the waves.

Neither of them care.

**Author's Note:**

> Funny story - while writing this, I spent the entire time yelling at Tekēhu through the computer screen, telling him to stop being so damn nice to Svana. She doesn't deserve it, at all. Like, stop giving her the benefit of the doubt, she wants to hurt you. 
> 
> And not in the fun way, either. That's what Yndira is for.


End file.
